Environmentalists Await Details In 'glades Water Plan

December 8, 2001|By Neil Santaniello Staff Writer

The state's top environmental official said Friday his agency is going to endorse a pollution limit for the Everglades "at or near" that advocated by scientific consensus and the environmental community.

But environmental groups did not immediately applaud. Audubon of Florida representative Charles Lee said he needs to see details expected to come next week on how the pollution standard would be measured. Those would indicate how seriously the state Department of Environmental Protection really wants to keep water clean in the Everglades, Lee said.

No matter what the regulations say, an intense battle over the water quality standard is likely to drag on for some time in and out of court, the DEP and environmentalists predicted.

"This is going to be lobbied and litigated for the next three years," Lee said.

DEP Secretary David Struhs said he is going to support a pollution limit "at or near 10 parts per billion" for phosphorus that flows from agricultural fields into the Everglades. He wants to see the limit applied across the entire span of protected Everglades.

That limit is one-third to one-half the amount that now gets into the Everglades with a cleanup program in place.

The number 10 is scientifically defensible, Struhs said. That level of phosphorus is found in some of the cleanest waters of the Everglades.

But "it is going to be very controversial, very aggressive," Struhs said.

David Guest, an attorney for the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, said the stated limit is not going to be the ultimate protection for Everglades water quality. The briefing he got, he said, indicates the DEP would measure phosphorus not at its immediate points of discharge into marshes but at monitoring stations that "are not terribly close" to those inflows.

Compliance would not be judged on the spot either, he said. The state is contemplating determining that by taking five-year averages of results at different checkpoints in the marsh.

Such methodology could make it less likely that the state would require a second pollution cleanup phase, Guest said. A second phase could double the cost of the existing $770 million cleanup.

Struhs said he wanted to use a network of South Florida Water Management District monitoring stations already in the Everglades to measure the cleanliness of water entering it. But they are in locations that would allow pollution to be absorbed by part of the marsh before it had to meet the limit the DEP limit, Guest said.

Under a 1994 state law, the DEP is supposed to recommend a pollution limit by Dec. 31 to the state Environmental Regulation Commission. The ERC must approve a final rule on phosphorus by 2003. The new pollution standard wouldn't take effect until the end of 2006.

Neil Santaniello can be reached at nsantaniello@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6625.